


Things That Are Sleeping

by scavengethestars



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-03
Updated: 2020-02-19
Packaged: 2021-02-27 08:47:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22094320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scavengethestars/pseuds/scavengethestars
Summary: An accidental crossing of paths, it seems.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Reylo
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12





	1. Chapter 1

Sand, in an array of colors as the sun rose and fell across it: red, amber, gold, copper. Sometimes the sand and the sky were the same dusty hue. Bands of light would glimpse through, glow, cast their shadows across the empty expanse, and then fade away. The scavenger was in the hull of a half-buried ship, its tremendous thrusters angled up out of the sand like smoking canons. They were long dead, cracked rings of metal clinging to their walls like the ribs of a drying carcass. The rest of the ship’s broken skeleton was in darkness, and she would be feeling her way through shadows, a tiny blue light affixed to her goggles her only protection against fangs of metal. There would be something worth finding. There always was; if not for trade, then at least for her eyes to feast upon. A hard glint of light as a castoff piece of debris was brought into the sun, stubbornly refusing to forget what it had been, shining one last time. That’s what she enjoyed thinking, anyway, as she was finding junk. Jagged scraps, dull scraps, nothing everywhere. Jakku: a thief’s ransacked dream.

The air was musty and stale inside the ship’s mangled abdomen. She could taste the tang of dirty metal as if she’d had it in her mouth, sweat beading and gathering and falling beneath her scratchy tunic. And over her collarbones, and at each cheek and along her hairline and back over her scalp; it matted and shined in her hair and she could feel her heart sprinting as if to outrun the heat. It only brought fresh gleams of sweat across her face, against the skin of her freckled shoulders and shins, blood from forgotten nicks left to dry in smears. There was no space in her head for trifling injuries: she was hungry, and hunger was a blunt staff that knocked the wind out of nearly every other passing thought or sensation. Fear? Hunger demanded courage, if only in frantic, hopeless flashes. Pain? Hunger hurt more. Exhaustion? Hunger did not sleep. It gnawed at her constantly, rivaled only in its persistence by her loneliness. For that, she could not sleep. For that, she knew a deep and restless dread that she climbed away from every day, cursed to return to at night. It was a sliver of metal beneath the skin, a festering cut that she hid beneath her linen wraps. She would be rid of it once those who had left her returned, a splinter she could not remove herself.

And it was worse than that: it was a full-body ache if she ever came to a stop, stole a moment to breathe, and stood sweating in silence beneath the glaring sun, heart echoing in her lean chest. If she paused in her daily expeditions, catching her breath as she peered out over the dunes of her pilfered junkyard, the loneliness would crash down against her shoulders and nearly buckle her knees. She’d steady herself with her staff, grit her teeth against the bullying weight of solitude, and lift hazel eyes to search the sky. The stars hid beneath heaped layers of dust, and she drew in a ragged breath and returned to the only search that was sensible.

Now she was crouched in another hull, pawing through graves of sand to exhume a trinket, or garbage. Brows furrowed behind her goggles, the tiny blue light illuminating only as far as her extended elbow, she was so wholly invested in her curious dig that when a tremendously loud crash shattered the air, she was sent stumbling back several terrified feet. Sitting stunned, hands fumbling the dirty goggles off of her face, she was just as shocked to find the previously quiet spot empty. Nothing had crashed through the ship’s dry hull, nothing was half-buried, blazing, in the sand before her. There was only the dark, and the returning quiet, and her wild heart. Sitting still, hesitant to move in her confusion, she could still feel the reverberations of the crash ringing through her. It was as if something had gone hurtling straight through her head. Blinking, bewildered, her curiosity fully intact, she began to push herself up, wisps of hair glued to her cheeks. The air was hot, the breath of fire.

Rising, brushing caked sand from her knees, her squinting gaze promptly alighted on a tall, black ghost. Immediately spooking backwards, stumbling in her surprise and landing with a blunt, dismayed whuff back in the sand, she could not immediately delineate the living shadow from the stale darkness. It was just _big_ – it was tall, and as black as black could be. Her swift instincts did not allow her to wonder how she had spotted him, then; she was scrambling to her feet for the second time, drawing her staff from behind her shoulder, bracing it before her and digging her heels into the crunch of sand beneath her feet. The looming figure turned, as if only just registering the noise of her scuffle, and his face was moon-white, cheeks splotched red. His eyes were, for a moment, just as wide as her own, frightened, and then something dark flew across his expression and he looked like he might lunge. She could feel the intent as much as she could read it in his fearful body language, a fear that turned to anger instead of flight. It wasn’t only anger, though – it was something much deeper, much more immediate and senseless. A beast’s drive to kill, a predatory energy, and for a moment the stammering of her heart urged her to turn and run. But he did not lunge, and her sweaty palms gripped the staff with indignant resolution, as if she might in fact do something with it. He was too far back, and taking another step back now, into the dark. She held her ground, gaze furiously prying what details it could from the shadows. Just a dark figure, dressed entirely in black, with hair just as dark. Eyes that were even darker, and she spied the fingers of one of his gloved hands flexing, as if in agitation or dull pain, or maybe both. As if he’d recently sent his fist swinging through something.

“Can you see me?”

The voice was, simultaneously, like a rock tossed down a deep ravine, and an engine roaring against her ear. It echoed and fell away, and was also instantly close, a heavy, jarring sound, a vibration that made her jump. It was behind her and before her, and somewhere deep inside her skull, the loudest whisper she’d ever heard. Dumbfounded by the sensation, she winced away from it, bringing a taut shoulder to her ear in discomfort. Could she _see_ him? He was a crumbling chunk of shadow, but she could see him, fingers curling in renewed grip around her staff.

“Of course I can see you. What are you doing in here?” Her own voice was a high, alarmed growl, reaching for courage. He wasn’t a scavenger, and he didn’t have the cagey look of a thief. He didn’t have the windswept look of anyone she’d seen in the desert. She could see the whites of his eyes as he scoured the dark body of the ship with a wary gaze, clearly distrusting of what he saw.

“I asked you a question,” she repeated, emboldened by his obvious uncertainty. His night-dark gaze returned to her, face as expressionless as a new moon. “I can see you, too,” his voice surged up from her bones again, disregarding her question, and now he stood still, eyes fixed on her face. The sensation made her thoughts squirrel away in a mad cluster, hands hot and pulsing against her staff. Was his mouth even moving?

“We shouldn’t be here,” he decided, his voice a low, electric hum, posture stiffening, a black-gloved hand rising to feel at his temple. His eyes flashed, and she recognized the brief illumination of panic. It was an animal’s fright, and then, like anything with an anxious heart, he disappeared. Not in the abrupt chaos of scattering sand and hard, retreating feet, but like a star winking out at night. He simply vanished. Her heart halted for a moment, gathering silence so that she might listen for the sound of his return, but there was nothing, and it fell back into its confounded beating. Her breath left her in a pant, as if for a time she hadn’t been breathing at all, and her grip on the waiting staff loosened. Not only was the looming, dark figure gone, but there was a new space opening around her, a close presence ebbing back, allowing her to breathe. She did, for a few long moments, waiting, and then she couldn’t stay in the shadow-spangled hull of the ship any longer.

Hurrying back out into the sun, squinting as it splashed across her face, she didn’t stop hurrying, running, until she had left the massive silver ship far behind her. Her heart was galloping now, but she welcomed the pang of exhaustion. Adrenaline washed through her blood the same way she’d seen fire-water tumble through gamblers and broken creatures. It smoothed over her prickling fear, and with a sweep of distance between her and the startled stranger, she gave in to the temptation to steal a glance back. Catching her breath, gleaming brows knit in sun-struck confusion, she studied the wrecked ship in silence. Sweat cooled against her skin, dry heat burned it quickly away, and she squinted at the long shadows for a moment more, thoughts hot static, before returning to the red wastes.

\---

The walls of the flagship were the same sleek black as always, devoid of any motion except his own. He hadn’t been alone several seconds before – there’d been a girl, half crouched with her ridiculous staff, materialized out of nowhere, bright-eyed and in rags. Her heart had been beating so fast he’d almost felt it strumming the air with its frenetic energy. He’d felt an awfully strange amount in what must’ve been only moments, and now his head was pounding, jaw grinding as he glared down the hall to where the girl had been. A fluke of his haywire thoughts, a shard sent spinning among the others. The hall was empty. 

Broken glass crunched under his heavy boots as he turned, furious at the fear that had gripped him - pieces of the reflective glass he’d crashed his fist through, but it wasn’t only that. There was the gritty crunch of sand beneath his boots, too.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A dream? It's hard to say.

The dust was already heavy – the wind had been raging all night. Her hair was tangled across her face from sleepless tossing, elbows tight and sore. How long had the wind been howling? The dark was still deep, and the memory of a dream swept across her waking mind: water, acres of water. An ocean, vast and sweet, and the vision in her mind’s bleary eye wracked her with thirst. The wind was lashing the AT-AT’s dulled silver sides, wailing through cracks and split metal. Her eyes snapped open like she’d been splashed with the cold water she’d been dreaming of, but it wasn’t enough to bring her fully awake. That came more gently, lying quiet as the soft glow of the lamp diffused the darkness in her head. The dream slipped away as reliably as the tide, leaving no tracks for her to follow in its wake. What had she been dreaming? Sometimes it was nothing more than water, after all. Sometimes that was all she dreamed, and it was enough. The orange light of the lamp was held in by nightwatcher worm husks, pulsing gently like the heart of the beast that had lost its skin. Did those worms have a heart? Maybe they had many. Rey brought a hand up across her eyes, drawing in a long breath.

When she let it go, the wind was still heaving outside. It was too much, barreling around noisily, and she couldn’t sleep through it. Aggravated, already resenting the fact that she would spend the next morning sweating in the heat, exhausted by the sun _and_ too few hours of sleep, she rolled onto her side in the hammock. It was strung between the rusting pipes and gears of the fallen machine’s innards, and she felt it shift beneath her, balancing her weight. There was another shift, more weight being balanced, and for a moment she lay still, puzzled, blinking herself past the cusp of half-sleep. Listening, there was only one thing to hear: the wind scraping up the sand outside, and then whisking it against the hull of her home, calling into the empty sky. There was the flickering of the lamp, crackling and soft, and her own breathing, which was almost silent. It was warm already, even in the dark. There was warmth against her exposed shins, and the back of her neck, and her arms, where the wraps didn’t reach. There was a heavy warmth against her back, and less-quiet breaths being drawn.

She held her own, and she could still hear them: distinct, separate, and behind her. Her heart vanished like a moon behind a cloud, utterly silent, chest hollow – and then it returned a moment later, high and frightened. Tracking her eyes to the side, she refused to move as she began to recognize with darkening dread the shape of a body behind her, heavy in the hammock _with_ her. She hesitated, waited, and then began inching one leg up slowly, her bare foot brushing against warm skin half a moment later. She was thrashing before she could think; horror jolted her into violence, kicking out with the ferocity of a cornered animal, swinging her arms at the dark, motionless shape beside her.  
That wasn’t true, it wasn’t a dark shape – it was a pale slope, a constellation of dark freckles speckled across an equally pale back, but then the whole great lump of it was tumbling out of the hammock.

Awake suddenly under the bombardment of her elbows and knees, her feet assisting him out, he rolled with a bewildered grunt onto the hard ground beneath them. Rey was cursing, her voice leaving her in a high, threatening cry, shrill nonsense as she leapt out the opposite side of the hammock. Her hands grasped a wrench first; brandishing the tool above her, she danced a few steps around the hammock, watching wide-eyed as the bulky, fallen figure lay in a stupor. He was on his back, dazed, and then he was reaching up to rub at his head, groaning in singular discomfort. Something about his hair caught her attention, absurdly snagged her out of her fear for a fleeting second: dark and tossed messily about his face, but it was so dark, in fact, that it shone. It caught the glow of the nightwatcher lamp, a sleek black, sleek like a patch of deep sky where you look twice, feeling that stars might fall in just that spot.

He turns his head, brow furrowing as his eyes land on her, and she has never seen a more hopeless confusion. He ascends his wakefulness with great speed when he notices the wrench in her hand, scrambling to his feet, dressed only in plain black shorts. As he rises, he looks down just long enough to orient himself. What he concludes, Rey can’t tell, as he quickly takes in the makeshift room, chest visibly rising and falling with the panic of his heart, taking a step back.

“Get _out_!” Rey rages, charging through the space between them without thought and swinging the wrench, its edges catching the shimmying glow of the lamp. The intruder scrambles to his feet, his bulk making him ungainly, his legs half asleep beneath him. He’s retreating, or trying to, cursing huskily, already ducking from the blow. She brings the wrench down in an arc at his back, his shoulder, anywhere she can reach, but it cuts through empty air, and the momentum of her wailing arm brings her toppling down. She lands alone, breath hitching, shoving back onto her feet to confront her foe. But he’s gone – he’s nowhere, the hull is empty, and she becomes aware again, several frantic heartbeats later, of the wind swooning outside. It sharpens the edges of the sudden silence.

She looks for him, of course: around every hulking piece of dead machinery and scrapped metal, in the shadows heaped in every corner, and outside of her door, into the night. He’s gone. The wind keens, sideways and up, drunk, chasing itself in circles. Her heart’s a rolling drum in her chest, and as she backs inside, the wrench is no longer white-knuckle-gripped in her sweaty palm. She’s dropped it somewhere in her confusion, and she feels a nagging hum in her head. Like the fading trail of a dream, a lost scent, a glimpse before it’s gone. Something lingers, something she can feel but cannot see, and no matter how many times she scours the room, she finds it empty.

\---

He'd fallen out of bed – his head is still ringing from the rude awakening, and he rolls slowly onto his side, taking in the clean, flat walls of his quarters. Silent and empty, and still it feels as if the air is charged, the way it would be if someone had moments ago abruptly left, the air eddying behind them. An energy clings like static, and then slowly begins to dissipate. He picks himself up, skin flush with – fear? He feels like he was just now being chased. His heart is knocking heavily against his sternum as if only just beginning to slow from the presence of some threat. He brings an open palm to the top of his head, rests it there, and then runs his long fingers back through his hair. Blinking in mute frustration, he doesn’t hurry to turn on a light. The dark is fine. There’s no one to see; he can feel that. He’s alone, and he pulls in a breath that reaches deeply into his lungs, pushes his ribs out in a rigid fan, and then falls back, calmer.

Then, deciding he’s closer to being awake than he is to returning to sleep, he begins to cross the smooth floor, grumbling as he does. His annoyance at the rough awakening is interrupted by a rougher stab of pain digging into the ball of his bare foot, cursing as he jumps back. Gritting his teeth as he bends down, he runs his searching fingers across the floor and pauses when he feels hard, rough metal. Rising with the intrusive object in his hand, he grimaces through the dark at it, as perplexed by the sight as he is by the touch: a wrench? There are threads of a vision attached to it: a girl, windswept and horrified, and feral. His calf twitches from the grazing touch of skin on skin. And then, like most wild, flagrant dreams, it instantly flickers out into nothing, just coals, leaving only a dull, disoriented pounding in his head. The wrench is warm in his hand.


End file.
